It's the 25th anniversary of Anna Wintour's first arrival at Vogue, and the 20th of her ascension to the editorship. Nowadays many of us use and regard her as a representative symbol of the old guard, and certainly as a tyrannical employer. As an editor, she's treated as something of a one-trick pony, relying so strongly as she does on endless cover-testing for the magazine and use of the expected celebrity face plopped above a so-so gown, shot by an expected photographer. But two things go largely unmentioned: The often long tenures of the higher-level staff and their strength as makers of an editorial product.

First, she's surrounded by smart people. There's culture editor Valerie Steiker, who came to the magazine after time at places like Artforum, who's been with the magazine for not far off from a decade now. There's Sally Singer, the fashion news editor, who's been there around a full decade, who once was an editor at the London Review of Books. (She is married to the author Joseph O'Neill—and if you want obscure literary cred, Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs is dedicated to them, as Singer was an early commissioner of his reviews.)

There of course is Hamish Bowles and Andre Leon Talley, who've been there since God knows when (well, Bowles started in 1992)—and even Plum Sykes, who, despite being an agent of the devil, has been plugging away there, delivering perfect frothy copy, since 1997. Meredith Melling Burke has also been there around a decade.

And yet Wintour's reputation, thanks particularly to The Devil Wears Prada, is of an impossible employer who uses staff like Kleenex and is mostly interested in throwing parties. While, back in reality, in the news today is Vogue contributing editor Julia Reed (also longtime of Newsweek), who is the first political writer to really trash veteran political operative Howard Wolfson, actually calling him "an idiot." That's not the doing of some bubble-headed fashion mag, is it?